Remembering Embers
by his-braveheart
Summary: "She dreams, some nights – of the ash and the dust, and the starless sky overhead." Rose Tyler, from one life to the next. Doctor/Rose, reincarnation fic.


**Summary:** "She dreams, some nights – of the ash and the dust, and the starless sky overhead." Rose Tyler, from one life to the next. Doctor/Rose, reincarnation fic.

**Disclaimer**: I don't own Doctor Who!

* * *

**_remembering embers_**

_summers and winters_

_through snowy decembers_

_sat by the water_

_remembering embers – willow, jasmine thompson_

* * *

_This is it, she thinks, the burning feeling lingering just under her skin. The universe aches and sings under her touch, stardust spinning, supernovas and black holes and everything and nothing colliding before her eyes._

_She breathes deep. Somewhere, sometime, a wolf is howling and she _knows_. This is it._

_The first life._

* * *

Ashes and gold.

It's all she sees. The gold lingers in sparks beyond the edge of her vision, as the ash falls from the sky like snow. She shudders, not from cold, and folds in on herself. _They're dead, _she thinks, _all of them. _They're all dead – there was nothing she could do to stop it.

It hurts, and she's so _tired_. Too tired to cry, incidentally – all the tears had been wasted before, in the blurry nights beforehand, on her husband and her children, her family.

All dead now, she supposes.

_Rassilon_, a voice inside of her snarls, voice laced with bitter blame, and she stamps out the animal inside, forces the beast into submission. _Not the time_, she thinks. It's far too late for fighting, and she is too weary, too old for bloodshed, despite the youth of her face.

The ash continues to fall. The screams echo in her ears. She thinks of her family, burning. She looks up at the sky, too dark for stars, and meets two very blue eyes instead.

Her slowing heart speeds up again, just the tiniest bit. In panic, in fear, some faint glimmer of hope. The wolf inside rumbles threateningly.

She expects death – a finishing blow. Instead, his hand touches her cheek, and his eyes are so sad, so regretful. He's on the other side, she knows – one of Rassilon's men. But she thinks he might be a good person, underneath.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs.

She believes him.

She opens her mouth to tell him so – but she's so tired, and the wolf's lost all her strength. She surrenders to the silence and the exhaustion, unfocused eyes slipping closed for the final

_(first)_

time.

They called him the Other.

His eyes were so blue.

* * *

She dreams, some nights – of the ash and the dust, and the starless sky overhead.

They feel more like memories, though, than dreams. She thinks of the reincarnation theory, a thesis one of the Academy's older graduates had fussed over, some time back.

She sees him in glimpses, here – black hair, angular features, eyes so blue it aches. She knows him, she thinks. Or had, once.

Hadn't she?

She doesn't get the chance to find out. She dies, far too young, by the hands of a virus that eats away at a Time Lord's regenerations.

She thinks of the reincarnation theory.

Thinks about testing it out.

* * *

She catches the eye of a stranger on an asteroid bazaar in the fifty seventh century. She should be preoccupied right now, running from about seven of the royal guards from the main planet, all waving sharp weapons around and threatening to bring her head back to their king but _really_, she's just annoyed, now.

She jumps a vendor's cart and topples it over as she does, so the guards will be busy, even for a little while. She feels a bit bad, doing it, but hey, a girl had to survive.

That's when she sees him. He's watching her with all the interest of someone who's most likely thieved before. She knows her kin, can tell by the way he's not just watching, he's _observing_, almost appraising her.

She flashes a grin.

Wonders why he looks so familiar.

* * *

She's a waitress at a dingy diner he frequents often, in 1970's London.

They don't talk, not beyond his order of coffee and her generic call of, "have a nice day, sir". They don't talk, and one day, after an unfortunate alien invasion that leaves a number of people dead, he notices the bubbly, friendly girl who used to bring him coffee has been replaced.

Something churns in his gut. He asks, but all he gets from the boy who brings him his coffee is sad eyes and an awkward silence.

He takes a breath.

Closes his eyes.

* * *

_she always remembers something_

There was the fire again, last night. Maybe tomorrow she'll dream of the day it snowed ash.

_it's not always him – sometimes it's just her, and time whispering past her in waves_

She could recall days and nights spent, turning over the images in her head. A life lived alone on a distant planet a million years and miles away.

_she still remembered him – those haunting eyes, not always blue, but always, always there, in her dreams_

_(in her memories)_

Today is her nineteenth birthday, and there's something in the air, something that's so close to breaking –

It feels like a storm.

* * *

The storm comes in early March, when she's pressed up against a wall at Henrik's –

_nothing special here, not this time; no super genius, no thief or queen or pirate – just Rose and she's about to die_

He grabs her hand, and something shoots up her body, something she's been waiting years and years and years for.

Fingers curling involuntarily, she turns her head, wide eyes meeting –

_sad eyes bad eyes a multicolor coat and question mark umbrella a cravat and a recorder and a scarf and a bow tie, once_

Blue.

"Run!"

She does.

_something ageless passes over his eyes, something she's seen but never up close_

She takes his hand and lets him lead her down the department store to a new kind of forever.

She doesn't let him let her go.

* * *

**A/N: **This idea must've been hashed in one form or another at some point, but I wanted to take a whack at it. Reincarnation fics have always been a favorite thing of mine. I tried to do it justice.


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